Bienvenue. Do come in and don't mind the dust; the page is new, and so, in several respects, am I.

The French have a lovely phrase, une femme d'un certain âge. It is usually translated as "a woman of a certain age," which is accurate and tells you nothing. My own translation, after thirty-one years of teaching French to teenagers, is "a woman old enough to know better and young enough to do it anyway." I am allowed a few liberties. I have earned them one conjugation at a time.

In English, a certain age is the age at which people stop asking how old you are and start guessing, kindly and wrong. So, to save everyone the trouble: I am fifty-eight.

I retired from teaching in June of 1998. I was divorced in 1996, after thirty-one years of marriage. You will notice I do things in thirty-one-year installments. My former husband and I parted amicably. He kept the house in Falmouth and the Buick; I kept the good pans and the rest of my life. I believe I came out ahead, but then I would.

I now live in a small apartment on Munjoy Hill with a view of Casco Bay, provided I lean.

In May I bought a kayak. It is fourteen feet long and a color the catalog called "mango." My sons refer to it as "the midlife crisis," which I find flattering, since it assumes I will live to a hundred and sixteen.

I paddle in Back Cove on calm mornings and have ventured out toward Peaks Island twice. The first time I came home under my own power. The second time I was towed the last half mile by a lobsterman who said nothing whatsoever, would not take a dime, and tipped his cap when he left. This is how things are done in Maine, and I would not have it otherwise.

We call ourselves the Second Tuesday Society. We are eight women, roughly one bottle of wine per three women, and, most months, a book. Last month was The Hours, which three of us loved, two of us pretended to have finished, and one of us had confused with the film of Mrs. Dalloway. This month is The Poisonwood Bible, and it is very long, and I am on page forty.

I have proposed Madame Bovary four times. It has been voted down four times, on the grounds that it is "too sad." I have explained that sad is rather the point of the French. I am beginning to take it personally.

Peter is thirty-two and lives in Boston. He telephones every Sunday to ask whether I am "doing okay," in the tone one uses for a houseplant. Andrew is twenty-nine, lives in Seattle, and does something with computers that has been explained to me three times. He set up this page for me over the telephone and assures me I will "get the hang of it." He told his grandmother the same thing about her VCR in 1991. It is still blinking 12:00.

They are good boys. They are also, somehow, balding. Nobody warns you about that part.

At the urging of my friend Carol, I have re-entered what she calls "the dating scene," which makes it sound like the scene of a crime. I have been on three dates and two were with the same man, by accident. Two different friends arranged us, neither knowing about the other, and we recognized each other over the menus. He ordered the haddock both times. So did I. We are neither of us people who learn.

The third was a retired dentist who spoke about his sailboat for two hours. I spoke about my kayak. We agreed, very pleasantly, that we were in different weight classes.

• Ironing
• Pantyhose, except at funerals
• Pretending to understand golf
• Apologizing for taking the last scallop
• Waiting for someone else to open the jar